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Huw Richards reviews Swansea City documentary Jack To A King, charting the club’s rise to the Premier League

That the Swansea City film documentary Jack To A King briefly had a higher average score than perennial “best ever” The Shawshank Redemption on the IMDB film website is as statistically meaningful as the league tables newspapers insist on printing after one match. But approval from amateur reviewers and short extensions to planned runs in four west Wales cinemas suggests that JTAK – out on DVD and digitally in December – is a hit with its target audience, and with good reason.

It looks terrific, has big-screen production values and vividly recalls familiar scenes and stories. There is achingly evocative footage of the old Vetch Field and some great match action. The film-makers found compelling voices. James Thomas, whose goals kept the Swans in the league in 2003, is gently amiable while Leon Britton is engaging, observant and thoughtful. Fans of all clubs will recognise the feelings director Martin Morgan describes from the Championship play-off final against Reading, while fellow director David Morgan gives the narrative its emotional core.

The quality of those voices made it possible to dispense with traditional documentary props. There is no voiceover narrator or outside expert analysis – although the happy accident that fan Huw Bowen is also Professor of History at Swansea University enables some valuable perspective-setting – and no captions introducing speakers. This last may leave those not in the know a little puzzled at times.

Bookending Swansea’s recent history with the galvanising battle against unpopular owner Tony Petty in 2001 and promotion to the Premier League a decade later makes dramatic sense. Securing an interview with Petty was a coup, but his pleas in mitigation are outweighed by clear evidence that he was not, as asserted at the time, the only potential buyer and club employees recalling how they frantically hid cash whenever he was on the premises. To thank him – as executive producer Mal Pope has said some do – for the club’s subsequent rise is akin to crediting Andy Coulson for raising awareness of press intrusion.

One particularly memorable sequence recalls Petty’s sale of the club to the current owners, offering the compelling image of £20,000 in Tesco bags while leaving unexplained the logistics of extracting such a sum from cashpoints. The one real misjudgement is interviewing the “North Bank Alliance” opposition group in balaclava masks, making them look both nastier and far more serious than they ever were.

Fans of other clubs wanting to know what enabled Swansea’s new owners not only to survive, but prosper beyond all reasonable expectation, will find hints rather than exposition. But the film rightly identifies unpretentious chairman Huw Jenkins and, on the field, Roberto Martínez, as the key individuals along with the commercial transformation enabled by the move to the council-funded Liberty Stadium in 2005. Sequences in which Jenkins’ and Martínez’s parents talk of their contrasting sons and the crumbling Vetch is juxtaposed with the Liberty are particularly effective.

Imperatives to tell the story in 99 minutes and make it personal inevitably claim victims. Chronology is sometimes shaky – although starting with Dylan Thomas’s “To begin at the beginning” then going almost straight to the 2011 play-off final shows a certain chutzpah. Managers Kenny Jackett, credited elsewhere by Jenkins as a vital system builder, and Paulo Sousa disappear, although John Toshack, manager last time the Swans went from the fourth to the first, looms Hitchcockishly at Wembley. The main loser, paradoxically given the emphasis on fans as owners, are the Swans Supporters Trust. That they were already in existence and not, as the film implies, created in response to Petty is no minor detail. An established, if new, Trust played a far greater role than one improvised out of crisis could have done.

Similarly concentration on the personal histories of directors serves, presumably unintentionally, to marginalise the Trust. The end title referring to them still owning 20 per cent of the club looks a forlorn late gesture at redress, and could, without spoiling the story, have added that Swansea remain in the Premier League and won the League Cup in 2013. But if JTAK is shaky on some detail, it gets the big picture right – a retelling worthy of a remarkable story.

From WSC 333 November 2014

by Paul McVeigh
Bloomsbury, £14.99
Reviewed by Ashley Clark
From WSC 319 September 2013

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Since his retirement from football in 2010, diminutive former Norwich City midfielder and Northern Ireland international Paul McVeigh has worked hard to create a brand for himself. A regular pundit on TV and radio, he also treads the speaker’s circuit and has co-founded the company ThinkPro alongside sports psychologist Gavin Drake, which trails itself on its website as an “Elite Performance Development Programme”. It’s all a long way from the days when ex-pros simply bought pubs when their playing days were done.

McVeigh’s first book – the alarmingly titled (but largely uncontroversial) The Stupid Footballer Is Dead – is constructed as a 12-step guide for professional and aspiring footballers aiming to realise their potential and develop successful careers. Based largely around McVeigh’s thesis that mental strength is gradually replacing the need for physical strength in modern football, it is clearly structured and easy to follow, as each chapter concludes with a case study and a capsule summary of its key points. However, it is sometimes repetitive and better consumed in chunks rather than one sitting.

Though one’s overall enjoyment and appreciation of The Stupid Footballer will likely hinge on their level of tolerance for the near-messianic tone and buzzword-heavy language of the self-help industry (when McVeigh glowingly mentions Paul McKenna, he’s not talking about the ex-Preston North End midfielder), much of the book’s content is undeniably salient. In chapters with titles such as “Define and follow goals”, “Create a helpful self-image”, and “Think about thinking” he offers a host of practical suggestions filtered through his own wealth of professional experience. McVeigh is not shy of the occasional critique, either – he is particularly scathing of England’s 2010 World Cup squad, who he castigates for their lack of positivity, and has some choice words regarding Joey Barton’s perceived lack of professionalism.

McVeigh comes across as likeable enough but he often lapses into cliche, while an occasional lack of self-awareness in his choice of language bleeds through. When, in the final chapter (“There is life after football”), he boasts of having “delivered stand-up comedy”, it’s impossible not to think of David Brent. Another unintentional laugh-out-loud moment arrives when McVeigh describes Pisa FC as having “failed to sign him”, rather than him “failing to secure a contract”; this kind of lacuna in logic is perhaps a corollary of the bulletproof self-confidence he’s engendered in himself through practising what his book preaches. That said, McVeigh is candid about some of his earlier career mistakes (often involving a drink or two) and offers welcome slivers of personal information about his upbringing in Belfast against the backdrop of the Troubles.

Ultimately, even though its content is hardly revolutionary, it’s not too much of a leap to say that The Stupid Footballer Is Dead, with its neatly pedagogical structure, could come to be used as a key text for coaches looking to help focus the minds of young players across the country. However, it remains to be seen whether the current generation of English footballers, who McVeigh characterises as being hooked on Xbox, will pay it much attention.

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The inside stories of Albion’s amazing 21st century odyssey
by Chris Lepkowski
Shareholders for Albion, £16.99
Reviewed by James Baxter
From WSC 315 May 2013

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Written by West Bromwich Albion’s Birmingham Mail correspondent Chris Lepkowski, this book uses in-depth interviews with 12 players to present the inside line on “Albion’s amazing 21st century odyssey”. While the last 12 years have delivered four promotions, three relegations and the 2004-05 “great escape”, they have also seen Albion transformed from a chaotically run institution who gave Wolves fans something to joke about into one of the Premier League’s most forward-thinking clubs.

In its way, In Pastures Green reflects this transformation. The earlier interviews, especially those dealing with Gary Megson’s time, are genuinely revelatory in places. Dutch midfielder Richard Sneekes doesn’t bother to conceal his contempt for the manager, describing his style of football as requiring “running for the sake of running”. Striker Bob Taylor, meanwhile, was brought back to The Hawthorns by Megson in 2000 but, by the end of his final season three years later, he had been frozen out. He believes that Megson’s decision to allow him a start in the last fixture, at home to Newcastle, was made purely to humiliate him since he was nowhere near match fit. Taylor is further convinced that, as he was being helped off the field after sustaining an early injury,  Megson was laughing and joking – “milking the situation” – on the touchline. “As a person,” Taylor concludes, “[Megson] is a shithouse.”

At the end of the book there are further criticisms of a manager (or rather head coach) but Robert Koren and Paul Scharner are far more restrained in what they have to say about Roberto di Matteo, who “kept his distance” and “didn’t like to get too close to his players” according to Koren. Scharner’s chapter offers Albion fans little beyond a story most will recall from local media reports of January 2011. This was a period when the team were going through a poor run of form and Scharner suggested that the abandonment of the players’ self-policed system of fines for minor acts of indiscipline was among the reasons.

Cancer sufferer John Hartson, who left Albion in 2008 as his health went into decline, gives by far the most moving interview, expressing regret at ignoring an appointment with a specialist that was made for him by Albion’s club doctor, Kevin Conod. “Kevin did everything in his power to help me… but doctors aren’t going to hold your hand and take you to the specialist.” There is more to In Pastures Green, including a few throwaway, if entertaining, tales of dressing-room high-jinks. For his own part, Lepkowski is a discreet narrator who allows his interviewees to tell their stories without the need for too many interjections. Shareholders for Albion, who commissioned the book, break up the narrative with regular accounts of the state of the club’s finances. Those not interested in the intricacies of share issues and the like can safely skip the passages concerned. They certainly do not detract from a fine read – one you don’t need to be an Albion fan to appreciate.

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A new anthology of Victorian football writing
Edited by Paul Brown
Goal-Post, £8.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 311 January 2013

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There has been a recent growth of interest in Victorian football, possibly because, as the editor here speculates, we “have grown weary of certain aspects of modern football [and] will no doubt find much to admire in the Victorian game”. November 2012 saw a restaging of the 1872 FA Cup final at The Oval, next year sees the 150th anniversary celebrations of the FA and there is excellent and revelatory work being done on the early club histories of, for example, Arsenal – as featured in WSC 300.

From the modern fan’s perspective 19th century accounts of football appear remarkable for their lack of analysis and self-awareness: plenty of hot scrimmages and backing-up but very little on how football became so popular so quickly and what it was about football that particularly engaged players and fans over other sports. This anthology of contemporary articles goes a short way to providing some of the answers.

It is not a history lesson but a “flavour” of football writing at the time. Still, it is odd to suggest that a piece from 1869 on how to make a football shares the same flavour as an 1898 interview on Tottenham’s business plan for the 20th century (which was well executed, as it happens). There is no obvious organising principle and if you want to sense the development of the game chronologically you have to do the page-finding yourself.

Of the 21 articles a few are well known: the foundation meeting of the FA, the first Scotland v England international match. The earliest article is from 1862 and the latest from 1900 but there are only three from 1872-82, the decade which was the most formative period in establishing the popularity of football. This was the one era where that old Shanklyism “there’s nothing new in football” would have failed. Paul Brown finds a number of later pieces that resonate with modern football concerns: the celebrity footballer tempted by the good life, a referee’s view of gamesmanship, Burnley falling out of the top division into “the dark”, and vulgar and abusive fans. There’s even a forerunner of the Respect campaign, “success to football, irrespective of class or creed”, in the form of an after-dinner toast, not pre-match banner.

One fascinating extract features a reporter travelling away with the team (think of Hunter Davies’s 1972 The Glory Game set in a Victorian railway carriage) and another gives a good impression of what it was like to be in the first ever floodlit crowd (Bramall Lane, 1878, unsafe). Brown’s intention is to make a series from this often beautifully written material and I look forward to seeing more of how much, and how little, football has changed since its first days.

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My life watching 
West Ham through 
a camera lens
by Steve Bacon & Kirk Blows
Biteback, £15.99
Reviewed by Neil Fairchild
From WSC 310 December 2012

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When Steve Bacon was appointed West Ham club photographer in 1980, John Lyall was only the fifth West Ham manager of the 20th century. In the 23 years since Lyall’s departure, there have been nine different permanent managers and almost as many promotions and relegations. For Hammers fans the familiar rotund figure of Bacon waddling across the pitch on matchdays has become a reassuring constant in an uncertain world.

Until Alan Pardew arrived in 2003 Bacon would travel to away matches on the team coach. He would even be present in the dressing room during team talks. There’s Only One Stevie Bacon is a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the dysfunctional world of West Ham over three decades, with a chapter dedicated to the tenure of each manager from Lyall to Gianfranco Zola.

Although Bacon’s subjectivity gives the book a partial and at times spiteful feel – Paul Kitson is a “weasel”, Brian Kidd a “horrible little shit” – his refusal to pander to fans’ preconceptions makes for a refreshing viewpoint. Ron Greenwood is an “awkward bugger” and Pardew, who was the last manager to have his name sung by West Ham fans, is repeatedly dismissed as arrogant and mocked for his use of psychology and motivational techniques. Lou Macari, loved by neither fans nor players, is portrayed in a surprisingly compassionate light. Others are depicted in exactly the way you would expect: old-fashioned Billy Bonds, for example, struggles with the modern world. Following rumours about the close relationship between Ian Bishop and Trevor Morley, Bonds calls both players into his office and asks: “Well, are you or ain’t you?” It turns out they ain’t.

Kirk Blows, author of various books on West Ham, has been enlisted to bring a sense of cohesion to these anecdotes. Blows appears to have viewed his role as that of articulating Bacon’s thoughts rather than challenging them. At times some editing would have been kind. Bacon’s bafflement at the poor quality of televisions in a department store in 1980s communist Romania (“the arsehole of the universe” as he charmingly calls it) would have been a useful omission.

Bacon is the first to admit that he is no football expert and this book sheds little light on why the FA Cup that was won just before his arrival was the club’s last piece of major silverware. Nevertheless there are plenty of interesting and funny tales: the team coach stopping on the way to a match at Stoke to allow the kit manager to put a bet on for Macari; a naked John Moncur jumping out of a locker during one of Harry Redknapp’s team talks; a frightened Paolo di Canio telling a stewardess “I don’t want to die” before getting off a plane that is about to take off.

Far too often the tone of the book is brought down by stories that would be better left in the pub. His fondness of Mark Ward’s wife’s “big boobs” and a players’ masturbation competition on the team coach (yes, really) are two examples. Then again, given the niche target market for this book, perhaps Bacon simply has a good understanding of his audience.

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